THE PIN–UP QUOTE: JEAN NOUVEL

An architect’s knowledge is literary, it’s philosophical, it’s cinematic, it’s about a vision of the world. Given what’s going on at the moment, how things are changing for architects, I think I’m going to have to take a militant stand once again. Today’s plague, which you find everywhere, is big business. They want to make money for their shareholders, with a profit margin approaching what they make in other sectors. But urbanism and construction aren’t designed for that! The authorities seems to have given in to the fact that big business runs everything. In Paris they’re about to authorize construction of I don’t know how many, something like 75,000 homes to be built very quickly, on the cheapest available land. So we’ll find ourselves with yet another ring of development round the city with no real thought about the urbanism or integration, just thrown up as fast as possible. It’ll just give us another series of shit. It’s a scandal, both morally and humanly! There’s no one left to defend the people who are going to have to live in dwellings that weren’t even properly planned.

Taken from an interview with Andrew Ayers in PIN–UP No. 19, Fall Winter 2015/16.